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Wednesday, March 01, 2017

Sex and gender

Gender realism/essentialism considers gender to be primarily a matter of biological sex, although there can be cultural variations in how to define, express, and encourage masculinity and femininity. Fundamentally nature with some nurture overlay. Gender nominalism views gender as a product of social conditioning. Nurture rather than nature. At least, those are the rough-cut definitions I'm using.

Another approach by the transgender lobby is to define gender as a psychological rather than physical condition. Gender is in your mind. There's a grain of truth to that, but it's supposed to be correlated with our bodies. Otherwise, it's delusional.

Since so many of the finespun distinctions which the transgender lobby draws are imaginary, the definitions are endlessly protean, since they're not constrained by biology, but ideology.

There's extensive anecdotal as well as sociological data that men and women stereotypically have distinctive interests and cognitive abilities. Overlap doesn't eliminate the distinctives. It just means men and women belong to the same natural kind: humans.

There's the feminist/transgender theory that it's all socially conditioned, but despite aggressive efforts to "level the playing field" and overcompensation, the stereotypical differences remain.

I've probably read two or three liberal writers who used to believe boys and girls were naturally psychologically interchangeable. The differences were due to sexist socialization. That's until they had kids of their own, and the stereotypical differences began to surface with a vengeance, so they changed their mind.

From theological perspective, gender is grounded in God's natural design for manhood and womanhood. We could also add the possibility of naturally gendered souls. Indeed, I suspect that has a basis in fact. However, embodied experience in a male or female body will also have a conditioning effect on the mind or soul (I presume).

1 comment:

'Another approach by the transgender lobby is to define gender as a psychological rather than physical condition. Gender is in your mind. There's a grain of truth to that, but it's supposed to be correlated with our bodies. Otherwise, it's delusional.'

This is key. Once gender is separated from biological sex then anarchy ensues. Historically, aside from being a grammatical term, 'gender' has always been used to denote biological sex. The relatively recent 'broader' usage has no grounding in reality, and is wholly a product of ideology and delusion.

Here's two examples from the staggering 51 'gender categories':

Female to Male/ FTM- a trans person who was assigned female sex, and now lives as a man and has a masculine gender identity. This person may or may not have altered his physical body with surgery, hormones, or other modifications (e.g., voice training to develop a deeper spoken voice). FTM is an abbreviation of female to male. Generally uses masculine pronouns (e.g., “he” or “his”) or gender neutral pronouns.

Gender Fluid- someone whose gender identity and presentation are not confined to only one gender category. Gender fluid people may have dynamic or fluctuating understandings of their gender, moving between categories as feels right. For example, a gender fluid person might feel more like a man one day and more like a woman on another day, or that neither term is a good fit.

2. Equally, one cannot flit back and forth between male and female according to personal taste. These are not football teams that you can just change on a whim (although even that would be seen as flaky among proper and discerning football fans!)

3. One cannot simply 'opt out' of one's biological sex based on 'feelings' brought on by a warped upbringing/socialisation. Gender is not merely a 'social construct'; nature and nurture are not so easily separated, and no amount of equivocation by the gender lunatics regarding the term 'gender' will alter this fact.